Word: guzman
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...they could help him enshrine strong presidential powers in a new constitution. The capture may also ensure his re-election. Warns Gustavo Gorriti, a Peruvian journalist and expert on Sendero who lives in the U.S. but was briefly detained in Peru after the Fujimori coup: "The fall of Guzman, the main enemy of democracy, is paradoxically going to do a lot of harm to democracy in the short term by strengthening Fujimori...
Support systems that operate legally -- such as lawyers' and citizens-aid groups and regional committees with their well-disciplined cadres -- are still intact. "I don't see them disappearing," says Gorriti. "They're too close to victory for that." Other analysts warn that the October offensive Guzman was plotting at the time of his capture may still take place; Shining Path operations are usually planned out in minute detail months in advance. "Don't think this is the end of the party," Alfredo Crespo, Guzman's lawyer and a leader of the Democratic Lawyers Association, allegedly a Sendero front group...
...FIRST PICTURES OF THE CAPTIVE ABIMAEL GUZMAN WERE startling: an obese, bespectacled man obeying police orders to put on his shirt. Could this dumpy, bewildered fellow, last seen publicly in 1979, really be Shining Path's shining light? Here was the mysterious man who billed himself as the "Fourth Sword" of communism -- the successor to Marx, Lenin and Mao. Under the guerrilla alias "Presidente Gonzalo," Guzman fashioned himself into the demigod of a cultlike political movement. As far as his supporters were concerned, Guzman's mythic aura of brilliance, charisma and invincibility shielded him from comparisons with other mortals. Latin...
...beyond question, his inflated legend may say more about the dreams of the impoverished people who revere him than about the man himself. He is hailed as a philosopher-warrio r, yet much of his best writing is shamelessly cribbed from Mao. As for being a warrior, while Guzman seems to have no compunction about ordering up the most foul atrocities, no one knows if he has ever killed anyone himself...
...merchant father; acquaintances remember a boy who poured his energies into books. At age 10 he was beaten by police breaking up a strike, and as a university student he came under the influence of a Communist philosopher and a painter who regarded Stalin as insufficiently revolutionary. In 1962 Guzman was given a philosophy post at Huamanga University in Ayacucho, where he used his teaching pulpit to indoctrinate students. He was profoundly influenced by Mao's Cultural Revolution, which he witnessed firsthand. "At some point," says journalist Gustavo Gorriti, "he persuaded himself that he was not only a qualified leader...